Last night, in NYC (I am writing this on the train en route home) I had dinner with an old friend whom I haven't seen in a long time and with whom I wanted to catch up on many levels: personal, professional, etc.

We met at a restaurant. And had an excellent meal. But: conversation? We couldn't hear each other.

So: my idea? Concocted last night, in bed, in my hotel.

Someone must open a restaurant...eventually it will be a wildly successfully chain...and its name will be HUSH. The food, of course, will be fabulous. A great wine list. There will be carpeting on the floor. There will be no music playing. People will speak only in low, soft voices. Shrieky laughter will be penalized. (I have to work out the details of the rulebook. $10 penalty per shriek added to your bill? Or would stern looks suffice?)

I have stopped off in New York, en route home from Paris, in order to do some book-related stuff. First, an event at Barnes & Noble to celebrate the publication of THE CHRONICLES OF HARRIS BURDICK

with the illustrations by Chris Van Allsburg, who was at the event along with Jon Scieska, Linda Sue Park and me, the three of us among the 14 writers who contributed stories to go with Chris's illustrations. Chris and I will do another such event in Cambridge, MA (Brattle Theater, 6 PM) this coming Friday night, along with Roger Sutton as moderator and Margaret Raymo, the editor of the book.

That event was yesterday. Today I was at Scholastic Books doing a live webcast...I'm told that perhaps 4,000 teachers had signed up, and of course each teacher had a classroom of kids..so it was a huge audience. We were talking about the Dear America series, and with me were Lisa Sandell, the editor of the series; and Kirby Larson, who wrote this one:

This is my very small and sweet Paris hotel, Hotel du Pas de Calais, on the Left Bank; and tonight is my fourth and last night here. I'll miss the window-shopping, since I am surrounded here by very high-end designer shops. Tomorrow I move to a different part of Paris, for three more nights.

This is my fifth visit to Paris, and each time I have stayed in a different district, gotten to know a different neighborhood.

I am in Paris, in a small hotel just off Avenue St. Germain des Pres, and have just spent a very long day at a symposium conducted entirely in French.I indulged in a kind of magical thinking...convincing myself that if I sat there and listened for a long time, I would begin to understand French. Did not work. And then...when it was my turn, in the afternoon...for an hour and a half...I not only couldn't understand it, but couldn't speak it. Luckily the wonderful woman who translates my books was on the stage with me and together we kept the audience of 300+ French librarians from rising up en masse and leaving.

This was my busiest day of "work"...tomorrow I have a lunch, and Wednesday a lunch...but from now on there is plenty of time to roam. On Friday my granddaughter arrives by train from Germany to celebrate her 18th birthday with me over the weekend.

My little hotel is in a neighborhood filled with small clothing shops. Boutiques, I guess one would say. I mentioned that my granddaughter's birthday is coming. Did I mention that she has very green eyes? Immediately around the corner is a shop window with a gorgeous green dress in it...the same shade as her eyes.

This You Tube video shows a wonderful moment at Fenway Park when an entire stadium full of fans joined together in a show of solidarity with an autistic man.

It makes me recall a time some years ago when I was in a crowded movie theater in Harvard Square...the movie, I remember, was "Kill Bill"...and suddenly a man a few rows behind me began making bizarre barking noises quite loudly. At first the crowd was irritated and there were some pointed "Shhhh"s (I might have been one of them) but then within a very short time you could feel that the crowd realized the man had Tourette's Syndrome, couldn't control the noises he was making, and everyone became empathetic. It is hard to describe, because it was a darkened theater, with hundreds of strangers around me...but you could FEEL the shift in attitude. You can feel the same thing in this very touching video.

The question often arises of whether empathy can be taught. I don't know the answer to that. But I think awareness of the human condition can be taught...and modeled...and books (plus parents, teachers, friends and fellow humans) do play a role in that.

Yesterday I went to see the French film called "The Hedgehog" (I've forgotten the French word for it)—fun to see the Parisian neighborhood since I am heading to Paris myself next weekend.

But more than that, it was a treat to watch the performance of the main character, an eleven-year-old girl named Paloma in the film. Some people, in reviews, called her annoying....and she would have been, to live with!...but for me, I watched her with a sense of recognition. Myself at that age. Solitary, secretive, introspective, creative. There is a scene in which she opens up a project she has been working on: a complex drawing of bookcases...and for a moment I was plunged back into my own child self, tongue between my teeth, concentrating, pens and brushes and papers, doing the same kind of fastidious projects..

I just tried to answer an email from a ninth-grade student, and my reply was rejected (an official notice saying something like "You can't send email to this address") so a girl working on a research paper tried to get some info from me....which i tried to provide...but won't succeed. Hers was a school address. I'm not sure how that works, whether schools block email from strangers, or what. But it is probably a good idea to use your personal email address when contacting me (which you would do by clicking on the "email me" window to the right of my website page.)

Those of you—often students—who have questions about books or writing, please EMAIL me. ON the right side of my website is the place you click on. It says EMAIL ME and there is a cartoon of me at my computer.

If you send those questions to my blog, they will be deleted. If you send them by email, they'll be answered. Simple as that.

When my younger daughter was quite young—five perhaps, or six—she had an imaginary friend named October. No one was allowed to scoff at that, or to make jokes; October was a very serous presence in our lives for a time. I think we sometimes even set a place at the table for her.

October was the month of my daughter's birthday so perhaps that gave the word special import in her imagination and in the naming of that unseen companion.

And no question: October is a very special month, more so in New England.

I'm in Maine at the moment. I drove up here yesterday and will be here for a few days tending to pre-winter chores. And in the month since I was last here, things have changed. It is quieter now. Tourists are gone. Colors are fading (soon to erupt in foliage, but not yet); the reeds in swampy areas along the lake have turned brown. No chirping birds in the early morning. My meadow has been mowed by Dave, who does it each fall, and so the tall grass and wildflowers are gone for another season.

But one thing has burst into its end-of-season magnificence. My son Ben begins morning glories every summer from seed, then plants the seedlings beside the porch at the farm;and all summer we watch the spindly plants move slowly upward, entwining themselves along the strings that Ben has placed, framing the hummingbird feeder eventually....but never quite bursting into luxurious growth and bloom until the very end of their season. Here they are now—in this picture the blossoms folded because of rain—at their height, when almost everything else is withdrawing and fading.

The lion indeed lies down with the lamb, and here they both are, on my TV room rug.

But Alfie (the lion) is off at the kennel...I will soon go to pick him up...because I was gone all day at a workshop sponsored jointly by PEN NE and the NE chapter of SCBWI. Other authors and illustrators were Bill Thomson, Kathryn Lasky, and Jacqueline Davies.

OKay, the email function on the new website is now up and running and I have spent a number of hours replying to the accumulated emails, and all is well.Alfie has been at the doggie spa all day and is home with a shampoo smell and a nice haircut. A friend is due soon to have dinner and watch the Sox game tonight, an important one, so hand-holding is necessary.

I have just received the first copies of the illustrated gift edition of THE GIVER....here's a sample. The illustrations are by the incredible Bagram Ibatoulline and I could not be happier. This book, with its gorgeous jacket, (and some additional material inside), would be a perfect Christmas gift. It will be available in late October.

Most of you are aware that my old (and obsolete) website has been replaced with the new one, which is still a work in progress.Some glitch yet to be diagnosed means that email sent to me through the new website is not getting through. It is out there in cyberspace but has yet to arrive on my computer screen. So there are many of you whose emails have gone unanswered.

This will be fixed by my oh-so-competent Website Guy---I hope very soon. In the meantime my apologies to many of you who must be wondering why you have not received a reply. Soon. Soon!

The Shelburne, VT bookstore called The Flying Pig has a nice upstairs event space (and they hold many events!) and here are the kids coming in and getting settled before my visit with them. What a nice time! Thank you, store owners Josie and Elizabeth. Thank you, Shelburne. Thank you, Flying Pig.

And thank you, Bearded Frog, for a wonderful dinner later!

What is it, incidentally, with the airborne mammal and the hirsute amphibian? Store and restaurant names seem, in that town, to combine creatures and descriptive adjectives in interesting ways.

in order to do a book event at the nearby Northshire Bookstore. This morning I was picked up by a driver and taken two hours north to Shelburne, VT, and to my surprise it is sunny and hot..in the 80's. The past two days have been chilly and damp and in anticipation of that I came clothed in a sweater...with a different sweater in my bag for a change of clothes...but when I went for a walk, to get lunch, wearing my dark blue cashmere, I almost melted.

So I looked for a store that could sell me a tee shirt and of course found one, and bought one. But...this being Vermont...my new shirt comes with a lengthy message about peace and composting and loving the earth in all its forms.

Hugo Award-winning novelist Harlan Ellison has come out of obscurity and is suing the makers of a new sci-fi thriller film starring Justin Timberlake, claiming that the film is a total ripoff of a prize-winning short story he published in 1965. The copyright suit, which was filed Wednesday, claims that In Time, which is written and directed by Andrew Niccol (The Truman Show, Gattaca) borrows a substantial amount of material from Repent, Harlequin!

...San Francisco, of course. That's where I am, visiting my daughter for a few days, then some close friends.

Here I am at the Rodin sculpture garden on the Stanford campus yesterday

Just last fall I was at the Rodin Mueum in Paris so this felt very familiar. Kind of sad, remembering being there wiht Martin such a short time ago....but also nice to reecall the many wonderful trips we had together. That day, we had lunch in a small cafe near the Rodin Museum, and were seated next to an elderly French couple whose Englsh was as bad as our French. The two men concentrated on their beer. But the woman and I got to talking, or trying to talk, and she told me (in poor English) that they had a daughter in Phoneix. I saud (in horrible French) that Phoenix is very hot. She agreed. Then I told her that we lived in Boston. She said (in horrible English) that Boston is very cold, and I agreed. We both beamed at each other as if we were accomplished linguists. Actually we sounded like Lesson #1 in a 6th grade French book.

And next month I will be in Paris again, with my granddaughter. She DOES speak beautiul French so I will be careful not to humiliate her in such a way.

Today is still bright and clear but I'll be bringing in the bird feeders tonight, preparing for the storm. One friend who was visiting left this morning instead of tomorrow, fearing she wouldn't be able to get out...and she has tickets to the US Open on Tuesday. My other guest is still here...he has a flight out late in the day Monday so shuld be okay.

We will likely lose power so are well-stocked with alternative lighting, water stored for when the pump goes off, etc. But I don't anticipate huge problems here in Maine.

I went out and picked apples...the trees are well laden this year...and then sent this photo to my brother, titled "Pie tonight"